Imagine a bickering man and woman, married long ago, each partner now with scant memory of what drew them together in the first place. She’s French. He’s English. They can make themselves understood to one another by switching back and forth between the two tongues. But they watch different TV shows, laugh at different jokes, vote for different parties. To borrow Hugh MacLennan’s political/literary metaphor, their marriage has split into two solitudes.

But … divorce? Hey, that’s a big step. They have teenage kids. And a dog. Plus, she depends on him to fix the wifi router when it breaks. They still have a mortgage, which he pays — even though the house is under her name. And she runs a U.S.-based internet business out of a Florida vacation property registered to his parents. Disentangling all that stuff would take forever. Besides, in this real estate market, who wants to be shopping for a new home? Never mind the cost of lawyers and arbitrators. Far better for the two solitudes to just carry on under the same roof, multilingual bickering and all.

What I’ve just described is — metaphorically — more or less how Andrew Coyne communicated the logic of Canadian federalism in his July 5 column (entitled “Quebec separation scenario impossible“):

The [separation] negotiations, if begun, would have to reach agreement on a truly dizzying number of issues, all of them zero-sum, with demands for input at every stage from multiple parties. Even if these could be sorted out, the result would require ratification in every province, very likely by referendum. All this, remember, while a simultaneous set of negotiations was under way on the shape of what remained.

A truly dizzying number of issues you say? That does sound like a pain in the derriere. You go back to watching Tout le monde en parle, honey. I’ll go fix the router.

Coyne is right … to the extent that this is indeed how a lot of “modern, bourgeois, law-abiding, mortgage-holding” (his description) Quebecers see separation — as something that, on a purely utilitarian level, simply isn’t worth breaking up the marriage. And by “bother,” I mean: the legal agonies, the lost equalization payments, the assumption of federal debt, the thorny issue of Cree sub-separatism, the specter of a partitioned Montreal, and so forth.

But what happens when things get a little less bourgeois?

Return for a moment to the apathetically loveless couple from the top of the column, too lazy to disentangle the many domestic and financial ties than bind. Imagine that the years roll on, and marital ennui makes its presence felt through the usual proxies — alcohol, drugs, emotional abuse, infidelity. Maybe the whole thing comes to a humiliating crescendo at a public event. And suddenly, the mandate for divorce finds its “winning conditions,” as Lucien Bouchard might have put it. When that point comes, married partners stop caring about the mortgage or the router — they just want out, the “dizzying number of issues” be damned.

The point here isn’t that Quebec is having a sexual affair with Vermont or northern Maine, or that the rest of Canada is drunk, or high on crack, or emotionally abusive. It’s simply that Coyne’s laundry list of complications and caveats won’t mean much if a clear majority of Quebecers rise up in a genuinely emotional rejection of their Canadian identity because of some crisis, or deeply felt humiliation, in regard to some issue that we now can scarcely imagine. When that moment comes, the angry split comes first, the details over alimony and constitutional custody come later.

Ask yourself how Quebec would react if an economic cataclysm — the Canadian equivalent of what the 2008 financial crisis was for the United States — produced a call for austerity, leading to a massive cutback in Quebec’s equalization payments by a federal government that had few Quebec MPs. Or what if Stephen Harper signed on to a military campaign against Iran?

For years, the federal government has been finessing Quebec sentiment with embarrassing sops such as “asymmetric federalism” and symbolic nationhood resolutions. But that’s only because keeping Quebec happy plays well in the ROC (especially risk-averse Ontario). The upshot of the Postmedia/Ipsos Reid poll (which prompted Coyne’s column) is that Quebec-appeasement is no longer an unambiguous political winner.

“Unlike [Coyne], I actually live in the province,” Peter White wrote in Saturday’s National Post. “I can tell you that the possible separation of Quebec is not just, nor even mostly, a legal or constitutional question. It is above all a political and hence potentially very emotional question.”

He’s right. And federalists in the rest of Canada would be well-disposed to see the issue, at least in part, through the emotional prism that White references. In identity politics, as in marriage, the cold logic of utilitarianism does not completely address life’s most important questions. If you don’t believe me, just go ask your divorced friends.